Week in review 28 July 2014

Week in review 28 July 2014

This week we learned of the dangers of going on holiday from Kaspersky Labs; specifically, email attachments that appear to be from booking agents actually contain a trojan that can disable your firewall services. Help Net security published a post talking about the psychology of phishing. One of the interesting facts in the article is that phishing can snare around 10% of the targets, whereas the expected rate of success on click throughs for a FTSE 100 company is typically less that 2%.

Social media is a rich target for phishing, with news items for both LinkedIn and Facebook appearing on our news feed this week. Facebook (as CIO reported) is a particularly big target for phishing. Finally, the big news story last week was the downing of flight MH17 over contested airspace in Ukraine. Not long after the downing, ScamWatch reported on a facebook scam related to the MH17 tragedy. Scammers have set up false profiles for some of the victims.

The profiles purport to contain extra information on MH17. If the user clicks on the links, they are directed to a site that bombards the user with pop up ads. The full details can be found on a news item on the ABC News website.